This is the Perfume Palace on Victory Base Complex in Baghdad. The story I heard was that this was once where Saddam and his boys kept their extra-curricular female companions. Now, it houses contractors.

This is me getting the upper hand on one of the guys in my unit. We were learning search techniques for a hand-cuffed suspect.

In this photo, I'm in the lower right pulling perimeter security during a short halt in training.

This mosque, I was told, was Saddam's personal mosque near the Al Faw palace. Now, it's located on Victory Base Complex.

This photo was making the email rounds while I was in Iraq. Reportedly, it was a wolf captured in or around Baghdad. I don't know that wolves are indigenous to Iraq, so it could have come from the zoo.

I was able to visit the Ah Shaw(sp) palace in Baghdad - one of Saddam's old haunts and now the home of MNC-I. These columns were huge.

This chair, located in the Al Faw palace was once owned by Saddam. It's a favorite spot for soldiers to get their pictures taken (can you tell?).

A McDonald's sign I saw at Ali Al Salim base in Kuwait.

A collection of rocket launchers. Hajji will often set these up, put a rocket in it, set up some sort of timer device, and then leave the area for the rocket to fire at a later time.

my new rifle

Believe it or not, this is what they served for dinner one night. I think it was a case of a Turk not translating to English correctly.

This is the Al Faw palace at Camp Victory in Baghdad. Saddam used to occupy it, but it's now home to MNC-I.

This is a rocket that landed on our base, detonated underground, and did no damage. I believe this is actually a rocket designed to be fired from an aircraft, but Hajji will use anything they can get to shoot.

House clearing training.

This is a mural I saw on Victory Base Complex in Baghdad. Obviously, it's supposed to show the heroic former Iraqi army. There's a painted-over figure on the left. I'm guessing that was Saddam.

This graffiti showed up on some walls in a local national parking lot not long before I left. I was told it is a memorial to locals who had worked for the USA and been killed.

We went through training on how to search a suspect and I got to play "suspect".

This is a mosque located on our FOB. No American was alloowed inside - even if you were security (like me) or an American Muslim.

Here's one of my soldiers manning the gunner's post. This was during one of our trips into Qayyarah.